Environment Archive

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted humanity’s growing vulnerability to emerging infectious diseases and underscored the need to reduce our collective exposure to these pathogens. Not surprisingly, then, the past year has seen a torrent of reports on pandemic preparedness, including one I co-authored for the Council on Foreign Relations. Most of these focus on controlling outbreaks after they start, rather than averting them in the first place. Moving from reaction to prevention requires identifying and mitigating the main drivers of new infectious diseases. These drivers are almost entirely anthropogenic and are the same forces responsible for precipitous declines in global […]

If the deepening climate crisis teaches us anything, it’s that we are embedded in the natural world and ignore this reality at our peril. At last month’s Leaders Summit on Climate, U.S. President Joe Biden pressed the world’s major economies to slash greenhouse gas emissions and unveiled America’s own plans to do so. The U.S. commitment was impressive, if necessarily tentative. It remains to be seen whether a politically divided United States can deliver on the administration’s pledge to cut emissions 50-52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Still, the scale of ambition suggested a dawning ecological realism—an overdue recognition […]